Bo

It was enough for me to know that in the Bo language, the word for ‘flower’ had been an inflection of the word for ‘flame’, itself a shortened vowel away from the word for ‘star’. I’d curled my tongue and then my brain around these gentle, sensible contours for a decade since taking Linguistic Anthropology 101 with Dr Denizen M. In the intervening years I’d published a thesis myself, gone public with my love, and now only my admiration for Denizen was private – especially from her. Dr M. had been asked to discover what had been the purpose of the Bo culture, and whether the recent extinction warranted United Nations commemoration, and so it was only natural that she and I board a boxy airfreight out of Kolkata bound for the Andaman Islands community at Port Blair.

Our home was an adobe shelter, a tumbledown joy. During the day I fed scraps of rice and chicken to the brightly coloured frogs. I ran for miles on dusty paths and forgot about my research work. In the evenings we sat and looked over the water towards distant dystopian Myanmar. Denizen was tired after three weeks of oily interviews with dignitaries and cricketers, and no further forward in her mission. Nobody could say whether the Bo culture had a purpose. How would they measure it? She slept fitfully, woke fretting. In contrast, I slept the sleep of the dead. When I woke the 34 Bo words for dappled light played across my mind. It felt like an eternal spring.

Bo. Prototypical, archetypal Bo, a grandmother among languages, spoken long before biblical Jericho was even a blueprint, before those cities of Ur and Harappa had sprouted from and crumbled back into the alluvial dust, before the great texts of the Torah and Veda, the epic poetry of Beowulf and Gita. Before writing had invented our future.

It was on a rainy Sunday that the pakora seller knocked on our door and told us that the last word uttered in Bo was ‘tikh’, a word he translated as: ‘feelings that span and change worlds’. After we had shared his savoury tray I looked up the word in my own Bo dictionary – a work in progress. Etymologically, ‘tikh’ was among the oldest unchanged words, a time machine stretching way back into the Pleistocene era. My rather inferior definition had it as: ‘the compelling happiness or sadness one takes between states of consciousness that change these states thereafter’. I thought it referred to waking and dreaming life. I marvelled that such a word existed.

At 70,000 years old (give or take) Bo was, perhaps, the missing Afro in Indo-European. And that last word breathed by this dying culture: ‘tikh’ – feelings that span and change worlds – howfitting.

While Denizen worked I walked. I ran. I discovered 45 new words for mangroves, another 17 for the reflections of water on leaves. The word for alcoholic drink, I found at a beach bar, had changed sometime in the 19th Century from horseshoe-bat-behind-your-eyes to death-will-call. People knew these things, but nobody could tell Denizen the purpose of Bo. She began to sense failure.

I cashed my life assurance, who wants to live forever? I called home, sold my car. Sold my stuff. I stopped paying rent on my university apartment. Denizen grew jittery. I wrote my last assignment, saved it on my laptop and FedExd it to my university office. Inside, on the screen I stuck a Post-it: ‘Thank you for the work, it was fun but I’d like to stop now please’. I made shelves in our adobe house. I started making shelves for our neighbours’ adobe houses. I planted vegetables. Two days after she left for home she called me from New York.

“I slept all the way,” she said.

“You were exhausted.” We listened to each other breathe. I knew she was fidgeting with her hair. My stomach tightened.

She said: “At the airport, I asked a pakora seller about the purpose.”

“Of Bo?”

“Yes, of Bo.” She was silent again. In the background I could hear sirens wailing.

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33 Responses to “Bo”

This is so wonderfully super-subtle. There is so much crouched down just out of conscious range behind the words and ideas. Almost like all the shadows and sounds you can hear in the jungle, but which your primary sense, that of sight, lets you down on nailing.

First there’s the rich metaphor of the last known-speaker of a language dying and that language dying with them. Then the world asks itself whether we should preserve it, keep it preserved in a persistent vegetative state on a respirator somehow… But how they frame that question – “What was the purpose of the Bo culture” – ugh, they chop down trees even as they count their rings…

Then the masterful facets of the word ‘tikh’. I’m am put in mind of the very advanced quantum science that proclaims the observer distorts what he observes by the very act of observing it, of course a wisdom come to millennia ago by the ancients such as those of Bo.

“Before writing had invented our future” – or possibly even strangled that future. The jury is still out on that one, but Socrates was against writing, afeared it would impact on rhetoric and the dialectical arts. Sound familiar e-books???

And finally the misnomer that is ‘life assurance’. It provides not one scintilla of assurance, merely a financial underpinning of those you leave behind. It is the one wager you can make in life that you are guaranteed to win, though you can never collect your winnings.

Hey Simon: your story took my breath away, left me slumped in front of the comp, staring blindly and drooling slightly. It was all so beautifully literary and I was gobbled up by your well-placed words that flowed rich with power… and then the end, the bittersweet romantic end with one word that spoke volumes… sigh…
I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks, eh?

Geez, this was another brilliant story. I am totally convinced that you just wrote a factual essay. I was totally intrigued by the dead language and trying to preserve it, figure it out. “tikh” and it’s meaning was very profound.

I am in awe of your writing style and amazing details!! If I was better with words, I could tell you more about what I like – but you will just have to feel my awe, for now.

I’m not sure where your ideas come from but keep it a secret. No one writes like you and your topics are inspired. Great stuff here. Your prose is so strong that I forget that you can also write dialogue. Don’t be afraid to use it through out. You are just as good at it and the ending of this piece is a prime example.

So beautifully written, a story about language itself. I wondered at the end if there could be something that changed the entire world in the Bo language. Instead it implied that the change was in the main characters.

You had me from sentence one, after which I “curled my tongue and then my brain around these gentle, sensible contours.” I stopped and did that. This is just wonderful, Simon. As I read, I grew sadder and sadder to lose such a beautiful language with such beautiful concepts. (And it’s happening NOW all over the earth.) Of course, some of the beauty of the Bo language lives with me now. I’m amazed at your creation. 🙂

You had me from sentence one, after which I “curled my tongue and then my brain around these gentle, sensible contours.” I stopped and did that. This is just wonderful, Simon. As I read, I grew sadder and sadder to lose a culture with such a beautiful language and beautiful concepts. (And it’s happening for real NOW all over the earth.) Of course, some of the beauty of the Bo language lives with me now. I’m amazed at your creation. 🙂

After I saw the tweets about your fantastic story, I had to come and have a read. First off, I loved it because we had and lost the most beautiful black cat called Bo.

Secondly, as everyone else has says this is beautifully written and so touching. It flows wonderfully, and is so light and draws you in. I also agree with the earlier comment about the use of dialogue, which really makes it sing.

‘Beautiful’ is the first word that comes to mind, also ‘thoughtful’- something Borgesian about the way the word “tikh” seems to lie as a template of consciousness, connecting present moments of heightened awareness to such moments in the past, stretching far back. Beautiful work.